A Trekkie nostalgia trip

Space if the Place

Space if the Place runs through to Sep 15 at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kreuzberg.

Named after the 1970s Afrofuturist film written by and starring musician, composer and poet Sun Ra, you might expect this group show of 23 artists to be about Afrofuturism. Sadly it’s not a contemporary position on a movement characterised by artists from the African diaspora nor a historic flight through the cosmic surreal of Afrofuturism. The exhibits instead fall into two categories: big minimalist monochrome statements resembling props in dystopian films like Alien and sculptures, drawings and paintings reminiscent of a more colourful and hopeful sci-fi . Works like Bjørn Melhus’s “Critical System Alert” play audio of fraught moments from sci-fi films from a tangle of black wires, screens and speakers whereas Jared Theis’s “Cuties for Space Invaders 1- 6” is an assemblage of what could be the crocheted cousins of Day of the Triffds. A great nostalgia trip if you’re a Trekkie, but with 90 percent of the works by white men, it feels like a narrow view. Even captain Kirk had more than one person of colour on his crew.

Space is the Place | Through Sep 15, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kreuzberg